Conservatives have a great many narratives that serve as both an introduction to a far-right (fascist) worldview and as dog whistles for fellow conservatives. Understanding and being able to identify those narratives is an essential starting point to working against fascism and even possibly having productive conversations with people who might be vulnerable to falling down the far-right rabbit hole. Most people, in fact, are vulnerable to these far-right talking points because vulnerability only requires that you are dissatisfied with the world under capitalism and lacking exposure to accurate facts about the world. I say “accurate” facts because many right-wing talking points contain aspects that are technically true, but not accurate because they don’t contain enough information or put the truth in a context that leads to incorrect conclusions.
“The system is bad.”
Conservatives are constantly complaining about “the system”. Like many conservative talking points, this one is a sort of weird parody of a leftist talking point, but with the crucial detail stripped away. Namely: What is the system? The system is capitalism, but conservatives claim to be champions of capitalism, despite constantly complaining about things that are a direct result of capitalism and — especially — capitalist control of politics (which is the natural result of capitalism). They hate capitalist globalism — the pre-eminent form of capitalism — the most. In fact “globalism” is often substituted for “the system” — again, global what? The real answer is global capitalism.
Having eliminated “capitalism” as the name of the system (because conservatives are constantly pretending to be in favor of capitalism), we are left with a bunch of oddly meaningless pseudo-systems, such as: wokism, cultural Marxism, political correctness, etc. None of these are real things; what’s real is liberals trying to create a world where money is the only hierarchy, and trying to tear down other hierarchies that they see as illegitimate. (The left sees the hierarchy of money as illegitimate as well.)
Conservatives hate this because the hierarchy of money is the only currently-existing hierarchy that they do not think is legitimate. I know that seems untrue on its face, but the fact is that they see certain groups as deserving all kinds of power (including money); they don’t see money in-and-of-itself as making you deserving of power. If a non-religious Jewish woman has a lot of money (and thus, power), that’s likely to offend your run-of-the-mill conservative, but a white, Christian man having a lot of money (and thus, power) might seem wonderful to the same person.
Similarly, when their guy is President, they want the office of the President to have unlimited power; when the President is a Democrat, the President has too much power and must be impeached (or worse) immediately. Even the conservative opposition to communism isn’t really about them being opposed to authoritarianism or a government control of the economy (in contrast to capitalists controlling the government), but rather it is because they see it as the wrong people having power. That is essentially why they conflate Democrats (who are capitalists) with communists (who are anti-capitalist) — they see both political groups as empowering the wrong people.
The way this dog whistle works is they talk about how the system is bad, and they list off a lot of problems caused by the system. An audience member who is new to these ideas nods along, and starts to wonder, “What is this system? Who controls this system? How can they be stopped?” and, after a very long wait, the conservative will finally reveal the answer: It’s Jewish people. OK, it isn’t always Jewish people. Sometimes, the answer they give is pedophiles who are also Satanists. In any case, impoverished people of color are portrayed as being the foot soldiers of this Jewish/Satanic/pedophilic conspiracy.
If you can get to someone who is discovering the problems with the system (capitalism) before they get led down the rabbit hole to fascist nonsense, you’ve got a real chance of helping someone see who is actually running the world: A disorganized cabal of obscenely wealthy assholes. I want to emphasize the disorganized part. They simply cannot decide whether the Republican approach or the Democratic approach is better for keeping and strengthening their grip on power, but on most days, most of them are willing to give money to both parties.
“The elites are bad.”
Why yes, yes they are! They are very bad. Who are they, though?
Well, they are not Jewish and they aren’t Satanists. I don’t know if they are pedophiles; maybe. But conservatives are not opposed to pedophilia if their people are doing it. See, for example: Matt Gaetz, Roy Moore, Dennis Hastert, Ruben Verastigua, David Byrd, Donald Trump — the list goes on and on!
In August of 2023, 6 of the top 10 richest people were Jewish — which is to say that 4 were not Jewish. Worldwide, Christians hold the largest share of wealth at 55% and Jewish people only hold 1.1%. There’s a good reason why a small number of Jewish families were able to amass great wealth — Christians used to think they’d go to Hell if they made loans to other Christians, so Jewish people filled that niche. However, if you look at Jewish people overall, they’re just as likely to be victims of the billionaire class as the rest of us (again, they hold less wealth than Christians, Muslims and Hindus).
It is the billionaire class that are the elites. They use the millionaire class (e.g., Congress, CEO’s, corporate and national presidents) to do their bidding. The religious, cultural, or ethnic background of those elites and their lackeys is a distraction from the important feature: Their absurdly massive wealth.
“The strong inevitably dominate the weak.”
This is a fun one, because in this case, liberals and conservatives agree! What’s true is that in the context of a toxic culture where people have been pitted against one another by the system (capitalism), atomized (separated from healthy relationships with one another), and traumatized (abused and forced to participate in abuse), we do observe that the strong inevitably dominate the weak. The idea contains about as much wisdom as saying, “If you knock things over, they fall,” which is to say, none.
The dog whistle part is what comes next, i.e., “The strong inevitably dominate the weak, so you had better be strong so you can dominate.” Dominating other people — and never being submissive — is the great preoccupation of conservativism, and especially conservative men. The reward for being dominant is not ever having to do any actual work — you just embody dominance and other people scurry about trying to figure out how to keep you satisfied.
This, incidentally, describes US foreign policy which, I’ve found, is supported by your average liberal. They believe that the USA must be the global 800-lb gorilla because if we started being fair and supporting democracy in other countries, we would not be able to enjoy the luxuries that are the privilege of empire. What’s funny is that they (the liberals) are correct; that conservatives seem to not get it is really interesting.
Instead, conservatives consistently have a different narrative about US foreign policy:
“We need to pull the troops back to the US to defend America.”
I’m not at all opposed to pulling the troops back — especially since the US is not being meaningfully attacked in any way. We have no business being in most of the foreign countries where we have bases or are executing an armed conflict. But that’s where this narrative gets weird: Defend America from what?
The answer that you’ll eventually get if you wait long enough will be a threat that is either overblown, attributed to the wrong group, or not even real.
Conservatives have decided to be very, very afraid of immigrants coming across the US southern border. They believe that these are almost entirely made up of Mexican cartel members and “foreign adversaries” and that both groups are going to do evil things to good, conservative families. This threat is dramatically overblown. Conservatives latch on to isolated incidences (like a kidnapping or murder attributed to an immigrant) and conclude that we are literally being invaded by the enemy. The truth is that the porosity of the US southern border is necessary so we can get illegal immigrants here to do important work for very little money; this keeps the US economy working properly by making necessities like food affordable. Without a constant flow of migrant workers across our border, the US economy (i.e., capitalism) would collapse. If we truly closed our borders, the price of food would shoot up, and conservatives would blame the US government. Moreover, the average undocumented immigrant is less likely to commit a violent crime than the average American.
Trump announced that he was going to deploy the US military to liberal US cities, and conservatives were overjoyed. The supposed threat there is communist gangs (i.e., antifas) and Black people. Neither of those pose any kind of threat to your standard white suburban or rural conservative but they lie awake at night worrying about both. BLM really freaked out conservatives despite their only demand being that police should treat Black people the same as whites; they also opposed specific acts of police abuse against white people, making them more of an anti-police-abuse movement for everyone. Antifa only shows up when people are advocating genocide; clearly, conservatives want to be free to advocate for genocide even while they fear “white genocide”.
Go a little bit deeper into the idea of defending America, and you’ll find a place where there is a vast conspiracy by “elites” (Jewish people?) to institute “communism” (capitalism controlled by the wrong people) by using people of color and antifas as shock troops. Included in this conspiracy is the Mexican government which is enabling the invasion of America by brown people by failing to arrest immigrants, but is also completely impotent in its ability to control drug cartels because the cartels have either killed or employed all the cops. And, you know, obviously, the UN is trying to disarm all the conservatives and make our children gay (this means submissive in conservative English) so they can’t dominate the bad people. Vast conspiracy.
Really, the only conspiracy is capitalism, except that it isn’t a conspiracy because they’re doing everything out in the open. See, for example, Davos.
The important thing is that today’s conservative is not really anti-war, they just have priorities: Regaining control of the fatherland is the first priority; invading France can come later. That was a metaphor — Mexico would be the first foreign nation to invade because of those “foreign adversaries” they keeping sending into the US. After that, we’d be forced to invade Canada because they just won’t give us preferential terms on trade, and we’re all starving because of this mysteriously long drought that has nothing to do with climate.
“America is on the edge of collapse.”
Totally true. But hold on just a sec — Why is America going to collapse?
The conservative answer has nothing to do with the contradictions of capitalism, the impossibility of infinite growth on a finite planet, or declining food production as a result of pollution (especially climate change). Those things are real. Rather, conservatives have concluded that America will collapse because of cultural degeneracy and submissive character. While they do despise the soft inefficacy of your standard liberal (and so does the left), what they really mean is things like gaiety, transness, feminism, and cooperation. If you aren’t being dominant, straight, cis, patriarchal and competitive, you are being a submissive degenerate. I don’t know how else to put it; that’s the whole thing. They literally see these things as all being part of a single, cohesive, anti-conservative ethos.
And that is why…
“You need to be a warrior.”
They don’t always use “warrior”. Sometimes they say “warlord” or “soldier”. What does it mean to be a warrior?
It’s a meme that is very helpful toward motivating conservatives to dominate local politics, and through local politics, state and national politics. That’s mostly the context in which the “warrior” narrative is used, but it also applies to literally killing your enemies, which conservative pundits are constantly trying to prepare their fellow conservatives to do, mostly by saying that this killing will be necessary because the degenerate enemy will strike first.
The point, then, of being a warrior is to constantly dominate — in every context, in every way, you must dominate. Conservative pundits make it seem natural that you always need to be a warrior by making conservatives believe that they are always under attack.
“There are evil people in society constantly looking for a way to dominate you.”
This is pure projection. By fantasizing about evil people in society constantly looking for a way to dominate others, conservatives justify being the evil people constantly looking for a way to dominate others.
“This is a republic, not a democracy.”
I have a whole post on this one, but the upshot is that conservatives do not like democracy. They prefer that only a small group (white, male, Christian landowners) be allowed to vote. They believe that only that group of people are noble and good enough to be allowed to participate in democracy. This view is strikingly close to Leninism, where only the elite vanguard of communism is allowed to participate in democracy (and control the government); the difference is that Leninism is intended to eventually become a society that works for everyone (except capitalists, obviously), but traditional conservativism is meant to elevate people with the right characteristics (whiteness, maleness, etc.) forever. Trump’s advisor Steve Bannon was a fan of Leninism in terms of strategy.
Some conservatives even take it a step further by promoting the idea that we should return to a form of feudalism with someone like Donald Trump as our new king. (And then they project by saying that the Democrat currently holding the office of President is behaving like a king.) Interestingly, this tendency to claim that rule by an elite aristocracy is better than democracy goes way back to Rome or even before — and is even echoed by the Democratic party which claims to be engaging in a benevolent elitism. Certainly, rule by an elite aristocracy is always better for the elite aristocrats, and, as I’ve mentioned, the problem conservatives have with the US government is that they do not control it; they only hate the elites because they are not the elites.
“America is not a democracy, it is a republic” is bad if the degenerate enemy controls the republic. It is only good when the right people control the republic which is why the wrong people need to be prevented from voting. They literally see a vote from a Black or trans person (as examples) as “illegal” because those are the wrong people to be participating in the republic.
Let’s get back to what is true.
Capitalism is bad.
Billionaires are the enemy.
Cooperation is the cornerstone of a successful society. Domination and submission are characteristics of a troubled society.
The USA should engage in a peaceful and orderly conclusion of its global military and economic empire, and instead use its military power to support true democracy — rule by the people with minority group protections.
America is on the edge of collapse due to the inherent contradictions of capitalism, the impossibility of infinite growth on a finite planet, and environmental and resource issues caused by pollution (especially climate change) which are all the responsibility of the capitalist class.
America — and the world — must be defended against capitalism.
America is a republic, but it should be a democracy; e.g., we must end the electoral college system.
And most of all:
The rise of fascism in America and the world is a direct result of the failure of global capitalism.